George Eliot Quotations | Page 5

To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.

Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.

Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.

Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

Lord! Thou art with Thy people still; they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to those that have not known Thee; open their eyes that they may see Thee--see Thee weeping over them, and saying, "Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life"--see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"--see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen.

As leopard feels at home with leopard.

Dark the Night, with breath all flowers, And tender broken voice that fills With ravishment the listening hours,-- Whisperings, wooings, Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings In low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills! Dark the night Yet is she bright, For in her dark she brings the mystic star, Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love, From some unknown afar.

Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.

Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.

There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better.

Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.

The worst of misery Is when a nature framed for noblest things Condemns itself in youth to petty joys, And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life Gasping from out the shallows.

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.

The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.

When what is good comes of age, and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.

Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.

I like to read about Moses best, in th' Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits; a man must have courage to look after his life so, and think what'll come f it after he's dead and gone.

In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes!

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.

It is a fact capable of amiable interpretation that ladies are not the worst disposed towards a new acquaintance of their own sex, because she has points of inferiority.

If I have read religious history aright, faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank heaven! to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.

Two angels guide The path of man, both aged and yet young. As angels are, ripening through endless years, On one he leans: some call her Memory, And some Tradition; and her voice is sweet, With deep mysterious accords: the other, Floating above, holds down a lamp with streams A light divine and searching on the earth, Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew, Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked But for Tradition; we walk evermore To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp.

A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.

The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

We judge other according to results; how else?--not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

Steady work turns genius to a loom.

It is hard to believe long together that anything is "worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.

Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.

I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.

But faithfulness can feed on suffering, And knows no disappointment.

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

Man cannot choose his duties.

It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.

The best part of a woman's love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.

A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.

The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.

Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.

Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.

He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.

A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.

Better a false belief than no belief at all.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.

When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.

It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.

God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?

I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.

I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.

"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.

What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?

I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own... You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

Our growing thought Makes growing revelation.

What if my words Were meant for deeds.

Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken.

Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, And serve the ends of wisdom.

Where you have friends you should not go to inns.

Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?

The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.

Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

When you see fair hair Be pitiful.

A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.

Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.

When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .

Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway.

Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in stillness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.

When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.

Our consciences are not all of the same pattern.

What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.